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Upcoming system base update

Upcoming SmartBots updateWe will be rolling a big system update today. This post is to announce the changes (with some technical details revealed in italic).

This is a mostly backend update (as a user, you won’t see any changes yet), but it is an important base for further feature updates.

SmartBots is being developed since 2009, and some pieces of code have been written in 2007-2009. This legacy code has been rewritten to modernize and unify the code base. Unification makes support and further development easier, faster and efficient.

Today’s update affects the very base of the system, so we appreciate if you report any issues you may see to our support crew (use the website Live Chat to contact us). The changes has been tested by our developers both on development and production servers. However, there’s always a possibility to miss something very special.

As mentioned above, this update makes developing new features easier. The next feature update is to allow Trusted Managers to access bot addon modules: your managers will be able to manage Support Bot and Sim Governor, set up bot Waypoints etc. Also, the whole Trusted Manager management section will be rewritten.

“Trusted Managers” section is one of the pages created back in 2009. Based on old and and overwhelmingly complex template engine, it is a pain to get it updated. We are re-doing this section from scratch.

Thank you for running your business with SmartBots.
More cool features planned, stay tuned!

[COMPLETED] Web interface is being prepared for maintenance

Unscheduled maintenance notificationThe web interface connection of SmartBots is going for a hardware maintenance today, Feb 18th at 8:00 AM SLT. The estimated downtime is 15-30 minutes. All bots will stay online, but they may not be able to send invitations for 5-15 minutes.

Feel free to contact Glaznah Gassner in-world for details.

UPD. Our tech support managed to do the work within 8 minutes. Praise the professionals! All services are up and running again.

Small fix which allows your bot to stand up

Second Life bots can stand from the objectWe did a long-awaited fix which allows making your bot stand up using the bot Control Panel.

Just specify an empty value in the “Object to sit” input bot, and your bot will stand up and give up sitting on any objects. Thank you for reporting this bug!

P.S. To appreciate the bug reports and wishes you posted there’s a new Store coupon 30OFFEVERYTHING available untill Feb 20th. This coupon gives you a 30% discount on any Store purchase. There’s a limitation though: you can use this coupon only twice. Choose wisely!

Todays bots’ downtime compensation

Unscheduled maintenanceDear customers,

Today we were updating one of the bot servers and it got stuck during the reboot. The operation which usually takes 2 minutes took much more time to complete.

We have several backup servers (to be used when primary machine is offline) but we did a mistake: allowed the same set of OS updates to be installed automatically on backup machines upon boot. No wonder we’ve got few more offline bricks within the next hour :)

I’m deeply sorry for the outage, we will add 3 complete days to all affected bots (1 to compensate the outage and 2 more to thank you for understanding). Indeed, we are also doing some changes to our backup servers management policy!

Thank you for your continued business!
Glaznah Gassner
SmartBots CEO

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